Shadow Bound Read Online Free PDF Page B

the stairs to the parking lot by twos and threes, a billowing cloud of blackness seething on her skin.
    A dark SUV idled next to the building, driver waiting.She turned away from it, tucking herself behind a low wall that marked the perimeter of the building’s parking lot.
    The stairs rang low and metallic as rapid footsteps descended.
    Had to be him. She quieted her thudding heartbeat by holding her breath.
    An automatic window hissed nearby.
    “You see the girl?” a man demanded, not six feet from where she crouched.
    “No. Nobody,” another man answered, drawling and lazy.
    “Fucking carnage up there. Grady and Robin are dead.” Anger and disbelief roughened his voice.
    Talia hunkered in her concrete corner. Her head pounded in time with the blood in her veins, and a residual whine from a memory of the band’s music set her teeth on edge.
    “That’s not possible.”
    “They were dead, ” the man insisted.
    “But He promised…”
    “I know what He promised, and I know what I saw.” His words tumbled over each other in his urgency. “They’re dead and the girl’s gone. I swear she was there when I went in, but I couldn’t see worth shit. She’s got to be hiding here somewhere.”
    “If Grady and Robin are dead, I don’t want any part of her. I signed on to live. ”
    “You dickhead. What happened to them up there is nothing compared to what He will do if we come back empty-handed. Get out of the fucking car and help me look. She’s just a girl, and we’re not going back without her.”
    Campus life hummed through the apartment building at Talia’s back, students building bright futures and making lasting connections. Heart hollow with loneliness, her hand lingered on the brick for a moment, and then she fled alone into the trees.
    Shadowman fights the lashes of darkness that harry him unwilling back to Twilight. The fae veils of Shadow ruthlessly bind him, silence him, rob him of any power that would permit another trespass across their boundary. Even as little as a word of warning.
    He roars into the storm, but Twilight is cold to his pleas.
    His daughter.
    The deathless ones have found her.
    The punishment for his transgression with her mother: to witness the hunt, perchance his daughter’s destruction, and in so doing, learn never to break the laws of Twilight again. So the sins of the father are visited upon the child.
    In his mind’s eye, he can see her. She clings to Shadow for cover, the proof of her fae heritage. Skimming the farthest reaches of the Otherworld she flees, but she cannot cross to safety. Her mother’s mortality will not allow it. Thus, she is doomed to Between.
    Run, child, run. And when the deathless find you again, scream, and I will come.
    Then blood will tell.

THREE
    “ N ot now,” Adam said. He pitched his voice low for Custo’s ears only.
    They crossed the lobby of the FBI’s Phoenix field office, signed out with the guard on post, and exited into the blast of record heat. At 117 degrees, the city baked in a concrete-and-clay oven seasoned with sprigs of cactus and palm trees. Adam held a hand up to shield his face from the glare of the sun as the light seared across red-tiled rooftops. They strode to their rental car. Custo took the driver’s seat.
    Adam opened the passenger door, burning his fingertips on the handle— damn hot —and slid in, adjusting the a/c controls to blow near arctic. Custo glanced over, green eyes transparent in the filtered light, his short dark blond hair spiked from his own drying sweat.
    “How’d it go?” Adam asked, snagging a water bottle from the six-pack at his feet. While Adam had been interrogating their latest source, Custo had the unenviable job of bringing the locals up to speed on wraith capture and holding strategies.
    “Local feds are skeptical, but informed.” Custo pulled away from the lot. “Apparently, Homeland Security has released a report on the wraith phenomena, though detailed accounts are lacking. The